Drupal as a social networking platform

Because of the way Drupal is structured, it is very flexible to adapt to the needs of a wide range of different websites. Permission to perform various actions such as creating content, writing a comment, writing a blog post, and so on can all be assigned to different roles within Drupal, be it the role of an administrative user or the role of a standard user who is logged in. This means that we can grant the permission to contribute and help manage the content of the website to the users of the website.

Many social-oriented features are included with Drupal "out of the box" (without the need to download extra files or modules) including:

• Blogs

• Forums

• Contact forms

• Content Construction Kit

• Collaborative content through the Book module and also through permissions allowing users to edit different types of content, such as pages

Drupal's modular framework, as mentioned earlier, allows new features to be installed at a later time. There are many modules available designed to enhance Drupal's ability to work and act like a social network. It also means that once our site is up and running, we can easily expand it at a later date with new modules to add extra functionality. Such modules include:

• Views

• Organic groups

• Extended profiles

• Blog themes

• Gravitar

• OpenID

• Janrain Engage (formerly RPX)

With Drupal being a Content Management System, we also have the advantage that a part of our site could be controlled and managed by us, as is typical with most websites, and other areas can be contributed to by the community.